Bright's Light (24 page)

No one stabbed or released him.

The room was empty.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and listened carefully. He heard shouts and screams. A second later, he was running toward the noise as fast as his legs would move.

It didn’t take long for Bright to convince Fon to go back to the House of Gear, thanks to the vomit all down the front of her sweater.

“I need Pinkie,” said Bright. “To help me turn on the lights. And to clean all the sick off my top.”

Fon stared at the mess on Bright’s hideous outfit. “I think you need to change completely.”

“Fine. But I need Pinkie.”

Fon distractedly patted the air where her hair used to be. “Pinkie will make you feel better?”

“Yes,” said Bright.

“What about avoiding the PS staff?”

“We’ll sneak in,” said Bright. She had no idea how. All she knew was that she felt bad and needed her bot. The lights would have to wait.

“Okay,” said Fon. “But you should know that Pinkie isn’t even a very good bot. I mean, she’s not like Peaches. It’s weird to get so attached.”

Bright ignored her. She had a feeling that being attached wasn’t as weird as Fon thought.

They reached the House of Gear and slipped inside. The uncertain lights in discarded equipment provided intermittent illumination, and Bright and Fon stopped short when they saw all the broken bodies, scattered gear, and shattered bots. Bright felt as though someone was snapping rubber lines inside her chest, leaving her heart unmoored.

Then she spotted Pinkie and Peaches. They were loose on the Choosing Room floor, turning in agitated little circles. What were they doing out of the dressing room? Bright rushed over and sank to her knees in front of Pinkie. The bot twittered. Her right arm shot out and her gripper twirled around wildly. The left hung, broken and useless, at Pinkie’s side.

“You’re hurt!” cried Bright.

“Ugh! I am getting sick of this,” growled Fon. Bright looked at her dressing-mate, in her terrible cardigan and cords, with her short hair and unflattering glasses. Not only did she look completely different than she had some thirty hours before, but she sounded different too. Tough. The T-shirt, which she’d pulled up around her midsection and tucked in to form a halter top, was one of the only bits of fashion evidence that the old Fon was still in there.

Bright didn’t know what to do. She was overwhelmed. The House of Gear was destroyed. Everything was destroyed. They were supposed to go to the Headquarters and flip some switch, but she had barf on her and she was tired and someone had broken her bot.

Pinkie scooted sideways.

“What?” asked Bright.

Pinkie moved still farther away.

As Bright watched, Pinkie, followed by Peaches, began to whir steadily across the Choosing Room floor. The bots skirted piles of bodies and gear and pieces of other bots that had been thrown from the tiers.

Bright and Fon followed. Pinkie and Peaches led them to the emergency privator used to take favours who’d been injured on the job to the maintenance department. The four of them rode the privator down.

As the doors opened, they saw the receptionist’s body slumped over his desk. The emergency lighting in the maintenance area let off a blue-green glow that multiplied shadows and was even more unsettling than full darkness.

Quietly, they proceeded along the hallway. Bright tried to breathe lightly and to ignore the increasing temperature.

As they approached one of the open doorways along the hallway, something made her slow and hold up a hand to stop Fon and the bots.

She heard male voices.

“No stabbing the spy!”

She had no idea what a spy was, but she didn’t like the sound of the rest of the sentence.

Bright crept forward, a combination of hideous crepe-soled shoes and dancer’s training allowing her to move in perfect silence. She could sense Fon and the bots poised behind her.

Even in the dim light, it took her only a few heartbeats to understand what was happening. Grassly, the PS officer with the bad news and the cute eyes, lay strapped to a table
while other PS officers said mean things to him and one of them poked him with a sharp implement. She couldn’t have said how she knew instantly that he was the man on the table. Sometimes, a person just knows. He looked so sad and alone, and she thought of how he wanted to save them and of his strange and hard-to-understand plans and of the feeling he gave her that she was important.

She knew that the men who surrounded Grassly were dangerous and that if they hadn’t already harmed him seriously, they soon would. That was unacceptable. He, like Pinkie and Fon, was off limits.

Bright drew back from the doorway. Her skin prickled with sweat. She waggled her fingers behind her back, and Fon and the bots drew closer. She gave them the signal that all party favours and their assistants knew from having to communicate during loud parties: Follow my lead.

She had to get the bad PS staff away from Grassly, and there was only one sure-fire way to do it.

“PARTY FAVOURS FOREVER!” she yelled as she jumped into the doorway. The nearest PS officer leapt back in surprise. The others froze in place. Then they raced after her, thudding along in their heavy boots.

She and Fon sprinted down the dim hallway, followed by the chittering, scuttling bots. They darted around a corner and didn’t have to exchange so much as a glance to know what to do next.

Bright crouched in the middle of the hallway. Fon flattened herself against the wall. The bots put their brakes on and extended their sharpest accessories. When the PS officers
turned the corner in a tight knot of black turtlenecks and stretch pants, Bright kicked their legs out from under them. Fon clotheslined them with her arm. The bots gouged them with their implements.

Four officers down. As soon as the men were on the ground, Fon and the bots were on them, taking their releasers. Bright turned her helmet light on and darted from man to man, ripping off dataglasses and shining her light into raw, blinking eyes.

Bright, Fon, Pinkie, and Peaches moved like a synchrodance team, efficient, graceful, and completely in tune with one another.

When they stood back to survey their work, a fifth man, dressed only in black underwear, black socks, and boots, stood, chest heaving, watching them. Or rather, watching Bright.

A long beat passed, and the figures on the ground began to stir.

“Are you—?” asked Bright and Grassly together. Then they laughed, and she felt her neck and chest grow warm, like she’d just had an extra-coarse exfoli-sanding.

“Fine,” they said, again in unison.

Bright could feel Fon’s gaze on her. This was all so inappropriate. And she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was stare at the strange officer who called himself Grassly.

After Fon and Bright helped Grassly back into the spacesuit, and Bright replaced the vomit-stained sweater with a turtleneck she took from one of the fallen PS officers, they all began the trek to the Headquarters. When Bright told Grassly they’d been on their way to turn the lights on but had become momentarily waylaid by important matters, a powerful sense of gratitude filled him. He took off his dataglasses for a moment so he could see Bright just as she was. When his eyes met hers without the screen of datafilm in front of them, he was sure he felt a blood vessel explode somewhere near his amygdala.

He put the glasses back on.

“What you did back there was very competent,” he said after they’d walked two blocks in silence.

There was no answer, so he clarified, “You are good at that.”

“Oh, thanks!” said Fon. “I’m good at just about everything.”

A smile curved Bright’s lips, and Grassly knew the compliment had reached its intended target.

He should, for safety’s sake, return to the ship to wait for them. But his own well-being seemed less important when he walked beside Bright. He looked at her shorn head and open face and felt flooded with something he could not put into words. He was reminded of Slater’s growl: “Rrrrrr.” That’s how Bright made him feel.

He wished he hadn’t drowned his ship’s link. He’d like to know how much time they had left. He could no longer access most of the surveillance cameras or any of the other information he needed to make intelligent decisions. The only strategy left was the one his Mother had drummed into him: one foot in front of the other. And so he walked. And even though the air seemed infused with something thick and noxious and unsuitable for lungs, part of him felt light.

He was hyperaware of the girl walking next to him. He tried to remind himself that she was an ancestor, but his mind was filled with the curve of her cheek and the way she made every step look like a sensational dance move.

Fon nattered on and on about what she’d do when her credits were restored and she was finally installed in the House of It. Grassly could scarcely believe that she still thought she had a future inside the Store. He cast another glance at Bright and saw her shake her head. She didn’t want Fon to know about releasing. About what awaited them.

“I’m tired of this old-school gear,” said Fon. “When I get to It, I’m going modern. High-end, barely-even-invented-yet stuff. Pre-first-release. Stuff that’s so new it’s, like, not even safe.”

Peaches twittered in alarm.

“Don’t worry, P,” said Fon. “I’ll let you safety-test the most dangerous outfits.”

Pinkie and Peaches erupted into a garble of electronic concern.

Grassly couldn’t help but notice that his steps had fallen into a rhythm with Bright’s. Like dance partners, he thought.

They were in the Productive Zone. All around them the enormous industrial buildings were perfectly still and dark. He wondered where all the workers were and imagined them huddled in their rooms or at their work stations, waiting for directions, waiting for the lights to come on, waiting for the air to be right again.

If his brain and heart hadn’t been so full of amazement thanks to Bright, he would have been more astounded by the idea that all the functions of this society had been hived off into this featureless landscape of invisible work. Here the ancestors were cloned, educated, indoctrinated. Here they created all their food, all their goods, and all their power.

What amazing things would they do when he got them to the rehabbed planet he’d chosen? Or would they recreate this claustrophobic Store in their new environment?

It was best not to get too hopeful, he thought. But walking next to Bright gave him the sense that all things good were possible.

By the time they reached the entrance to the Headquarters, they were all breathing quickly, taking ragged little gasps of air.

The black membrane that blocked the Headquarters from the Productive Zone reached all the way up to the skin.

Grassly stopped and looked down at Bright. “We need to move quickly,” he said. “There’s not much time.”

Her top lip curled slightly on one side, which made her look even more dear. Perspiration slicked her nearly perfect face, and there was something tiny crusted on her cheek like a beauty mark.

Bright gazed at him. “Why didn’t you leave on your ship?” she asked. “Why are you still here, even though it’s not fun anymore?”

As he considered how to answer her question, Grassly realized that more than his self-esteem was on the line. He actually cared about the ancestors, and particularly this ancestor, with all her odd grace and strangeness.

“We will leave together,” he said. “All of us or none of us. At home we say something is far out when it is very good. You, Bright, are far out. I will not leave without you.”

“Far out,” she repeated in a voice filled with wonder. “I like that.”

“Are we going into the Headquarters now?” asked Fon, who hadn’t been paying attention. “They’re going to be so glad to see us. We can tell them about the lights and let them know that we are ready to move to It as soon as they give the word.”

“Okay,” said Bright. Then a thought seemed to come to her, and she looked from Grassly to Fon with chin raised. “Just me,” she said.

“What?” asked Fon.

“I’m going in alone. I’ll turn on the lights. You two stay here. Guard the gate in case any PS staff show up. Only one of us should go. Just in case something goes wrong.”

As soon as she said it, Grassly knew Bright’s strategy was correct. But he could see Fon struggling to understand.

“But It …” Fon said.

“They’ll know what you did. How well you performed. I’ll tell them. Someone needs to look after the bots. I won’t be long.”

Grassly felt his chest swell. The only being he’d ever known to behave with such courage was his Mother. The urge to give Bright the traditional 51 gesture of respect, which involved falling to one’s knees and putting one’s forehead to the ground, came over him. He only got so far as the drop to his knees.

“Are you okay?” asked Fon. The bots chittered their alarm. “That’s not good for your pants.”

“I thought I saw something. On the ground,” he said, getting back to his feet awkwardly.

Bright’s expression was curious. He wished he knew what she thought. Maybe that was part of what was so fascinating about her, about the ancestors. He would never know all of what she thought and felt.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be far out.”

She turned and walked toward the unguarded gate into the Headquarters.

As Bright approached the gate, she heard Fon call out to her. “Are you sure?” Fon asked.

Bright wasn’t sure. But she thought forward was probably better than backward. All things considered.

“We’ll wait right here for you,” said Fon.

When Bright passed through the gate, she thought she could feel the absence of scanners on her neck chip. Maybe she was imagining things, but she had a strong sensation that her data was going nowhere.

The thought made her giggle softly.

To reach the Headquarters, she had to walk through a long tunnel. There were no emergency or accessory lights inside, so it was completely dark. She flipped the switch on her helmet.

At the end of the tunnel, a long staircase led up to a closed door. She opened the door and stepped through. Immediately, she was blinded by brilliant light, which drove her to her knees.